Hey folks - I am the lead developer of a 7 year old custom legit emulation of an 11 year old game. With a title like that you may wonder how I have time to post with all the girls I make out with but I figured some in the genmay community might find this interesting.

What's this all about?
Shards of Dalaya is a total conversion emulated server for ye good olde EverQuest 1. It's the most successful EQ1 emulated server to date, having been running for close to eight years and sporting a playerbase of several thousand active accounts, reaching upwards of 475 players online every night. We've taken EverQuest, spun it around, and created something of a hybrid between the classic game and something new of our own. We've done our best to eliminate the real hassles and boredom of the original game, without taking away the danger and challenge. Grinding is there, but downtime is significantly reduced, and all classes can solo, albeit with varying efficiency. Raids are there, but we've slimmed them down to 18 players, to make everyone absolutely vital to the raid instead of just another cog in a huge raiding machine. Dungeons are there, full with nice loot and frogloks. We have ~185 zones with some 9000+ NPCs and 18000+ items, all hand made by our own developers. Nothing has been directly copied from the original game, it's essentially an entirely new game in the EQ client.

Stuff for the Hardcore
- An established high level population and raiding game that is reasonably easy to get into, or even to form your own guild in.
- Huge amounts of raiding content that gets progressively harder. See how fast you can take your guild from the bottom to the cutting edge! More content is being added all the time yet is specifically designed to not obsolete old content.
- Dozens of zones and hundreds of mobs of varying tiers, from your average giant gorilla to your stereotypical giant elemental gods and dragons.
- Thousands of hours worth of AAs and Tomes to grind even after your character hits level 65. The entire end game is heavily customized to be more useful for classes that got a bad draw in the original game as well as to allow more individual character specialization.
- A stable and well-balanced game that will not take sudden gigantic leaps in content power to make people buy the latest expansion. You would be surprised how decisions are made differently when no one has to worry about their bottom line.

Things for the Casuals
- Unique Adventuring Bands that allow you to keep gaining experience at the same rate as your friends, regardless of the difference in amount of hours you can play.
- Treasure hunting, powerful tradeskills, high end dungeons and other casual content as an actual rival to raiding, allowing you to progress even if dragon killing with seventeen buddies isn't your thing.
- Hundreds of quests, including a massive main quest that spans from level 1 to 65, introduces you to the lore of the world, and gives you a number of irreplaceable rewards.
- Experience debt puts a limit on how much time bad luck can cost you.
- Groups are promoted via large experience bonuses, and powerlevelling is heavily penalized via experience penalties, encouraging players to be social and generally making it easier to find a group to slay your gnolls with.
- A healthy mid and low level population, that at any given time is made up by more than half the players online.
- Starting cities that are still the centers of player activity, rather than being deserted as in the original game post-Velious.

Other neat things
- An ongoing, dynamic storyline that you are able to participate in and affect. The game world is in the midst of a war, and zones can be gained and lost, and ultimately lead to victory or defeat, depending on how dedicated players are. Either way, future content will be heavily affected.
- A dedicated developer staff that do regular patches and additions of new content.
- A fully automated character profile system to keep track of your achievements.
- An online and in game vendor system letting you barter and sell your wares.

There are already quite a few people from the genmay community signed up (which is how I found out about this place myself). If you're looking for a slightly harder, better balanced and more innovative monster slaying MMOG that just happens to cost absolutely nothing to play, feel free to check us out at http://www.shardsofdalaya.com. If you have any questions, post them in this thread, and I'll do my best to answer them.

Media?! Media! I kept everything in link form to keep things convenient. I highly suggest at least checking out the game world map.

Our largest population is in North America but we also have a sizable European population with two euro guilds in the raid game and a fair Korean/Oceania population with a single guild just starting to move up the ranks.

I am still a bit confused as to how the aussies raid when the entire guild speaks korean though =p

I am sorry I read the rules and saw nothing wrong with it. Also saw the other thread here with the indie game being developed and thought it was along the same lines. Is there something that I could change to conform to the rules like his?

If I am breaking any rules il happily remove it. Not meaning to post where we are not welcome.

I don't think it constitutes site pimping or b7, but I'm not a mod. And neither is Elektrik:P Mostly because it's A) free to play, accepting donations(who wouldn't) and B) it's this guy's project. If this was an actual promotion I might be a little more concerned. Then again what's the difference? :P

I just meant the actual game world being so big, and with ~500 people on it sounds like it'd be hard to find people. Random PvP/grouping encounters was one of the best parts of MMOs

Oh you would actually be quite surprised. If you play during peak times grouping is pretty much the standard. The large world size is made up by easier tools to find groups throughout the world. You can globally broadcast group needs which helps a lot.

The donations about cover the costs every month with the staff chipping in on occasion to make ends meet. This is not for profit at all.